Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them  So begins David Hayden’s story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David’s understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David’s uncle Frank, a war hero and respected doctor; and the Haydens’ Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations turn the family’s life upside down as she relates how Frank has been molesting his female Indian patients. As their story unravels around David, he learns that truth is not what one believes it to be, that power is abused, and that sometimes one has to choose between family loyalty and justice.

Larry Watson is the author of seven widely-acclaimed novels, including the best-selling Montana 1948, which was awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, a Best Book citation by the American Library Association, short-listed for IMPAC Dublin International Award, and published in ten foreign editions. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his family.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Montana 1948

Kirkus Reviews

The rest of Watson's story treats the consequences of that arrest: grandfather Hayden threatens his sheriff son, excusing the war hero uncle's sexual rapacity as normal instinct (``You know Frank's always been partial to red meat'');

The Blurb

He offers them to us in chronological order whilst acknowledging that 'the events that produced these sights and sounds are so rapid and tumbled together that any chronological sequence seems wrong.' We should imagine instead 'a movie screen divided into boxes' or 'the Sioux picture calendars in ...